Skyclad (Fate's Anvil Book 1)

by Scott Browder

  As good as the [Runic Core] sounded, the armor was something she just couldn’t pass up. She lay back in the tub and braced herself, then spent the points on [Runic Armor] before setting it to active with a thought. The pain of the rune inscribing itself into her skin wasn’t as brutal as her first experience with the belt, but it was still painful. When it finally finished, an interlocking scale-like pattern had been inscribed into her skin across her entire body. It started at her scalp and etched its way down like it was being burned under her skin, the feeling growing particularly exquisite when it crossed her breasts and reached her backside. The lines of the scales faded almost to nothing across most of her skin, the edges standing out in thicker, bolder lines across her shoulders, knees, and part of her belly.

  She stepped out of the tub, drying her hair by gently pushing the water away with a touch of her Mana. “It’s supposed to activate automatically on impact, Lulu. It’s only a matter of time until something hits me, or…tries to, I guess. I’ll just have to let it to see how well this works.”

  Done with her bath, she now felt hunger beginning to intrude upon her day. She turned to claim her meal, and stared in utter shock.

  “It’s gone…”

  The spikes of earth she’d raised were still there, as was a cooling splash of blood, now drying in the morning air. A bit of shredded meat and bone off to one side of the arc of stone knives still dotted the ground, but other than that, no trace of the [Murdersquirrel] remained.

  She took a nervous half-step backward, glancing over her shoulder. “Nothing, Lulu. I sensed nothing…”

  The scrubby’s only response was a nervous wurble from her shoulder. Lulu was as keen to detect approaching threats as its mistress was, if not more so, and the loofah seemed chagrined and embarrassed to have missed whatever intruding thief had taken Morgan’s lunch. Smears and drops of blood led back toward the thicker brush under the trees before vanishing entirely, and she headed that way with careful steps.

  She found the culprit just over a hundred paces away from the stream, smugly perched atop a great branch of one of the massive evergreen trees which dominated the forest. Fur and skin clung to the bark of the tree, and giblets of meat and smears of blood decorated the trunk and the ground below. On the limb itself sat the massive panther she’d seen in the dungeon. It licked its paws to remove the last traces of blood, cleaning itself in a manner similar to its much, much smaller Terran brethren.

  “Couldn’t wait until I’d had a bite, could you?” Morgan complained at the unrepentant thief. Her instincts were only mildly agitated by the presence of the massive predator; they’d fought together, after all, albeit only briefly. Not that I would be willing to test things if she was hungry, the Sorceress thought to herself, barely repressing a shudder. “I guess you’ve been following me and claiming the leftovers! Just wait next time, and I’ll share!”

  The feline refused to acknowledge her, continuing to groom its fur while it basked in the late-morning sunlight. She found the sight remarkably refreshing, something pretty that, for once, wasn’t trying to eat her for either meat or magic. The cat gave no sign of understanding her, but likewise showed no sign of latent aggression or skittishness. Struck by an urge as irresistible as it was irresponsible, Morgan activated [Acceleration]. She heaved upward with [Terrakinesis], lifting a circle of Earth beneath her feet as quickly as she could manage with the skill. She leapt forward and up, the rising circle of stone adding itself to her efforts, culminating in landing lightly atop the same limb that held the [Nightstride Panther]. The giant cat’s ears pinned back in surprise, and a low rumble emanated from its chest. It bared its teeth at her, revealing a quartet of dagger-like fangs longer than Morgan’s hand. Before it could do anything else, Morgan reached out and gently bumped it square on the nose.

  With a sound halfway between a yowl and a soggy chainsaw, the panther melted into the shadows of the branches, only to appear in another tree several dozen paces away, hackles raised as it stared straight back at Morgan. Its fur stood out straight, making for a ridiculously puffy visage of a housecat writ extra-large as its tail lashed in agitation and it wriggled its snout in confusion.

  “Snoot status: booped !” yelled the naked Sorceress at the disgruntled feline, laughing as she dropped back down to the ground. “I’ll leave you a snack next time! You don’t have to sneak!”

  Despite her cavalier attitude, Morgan kept her ears open in case the big cat took offense and sought her out. She didn’t think it would attack, but it never hurt to keep her guard up. The tub was still there, and she was still hungry. She had a parcel of steak wrapped in leaves from the deer she’d killed the day before, but a diet of nothing but meat was beginning to bore her. The occasional berries had been nice, but nothing like the rich, sweet, modern foods she was beginning to miss now that the novelty of life in the Wildlands was beginning to wear thin.

  “I guess I can kill two birds with one stone,” she said, spending most of her remaining skill points on the [Runic Chain] skill. She gritted her teeth as the rune burned its way down her arms, tracing paper-thin lines until the pattern reached her wrists, where it morphed into thicker, cobalt-colored bands. Inscribing [Plasma Glaive] as the first rune in the chain was as simple as forming the different types of Mana into the woven shape to cast the spell, only without turning it loose. Instead, the banded pattern around her right wrist lit up with a gentle blue glow after a few moments, then shifted colors to match the Fire and Lightning Mana of the spell’s form before pulling the threads of magic into the inscription along the band.

  “Test out a rune, get some lunch, maybe find some berries to go with it…”

  She set off again with a whole new plan for her day, still giggling about her encounter with the panther. “I booped the snoot, hah!”

  Several hours later found Morgan sitting in a perfectly molded stone chair, with a layer of moss draped over it as a cushion. The chair rose up from a flat-topped pavilion that was the rooftop of her latest sculpted stone campsite. With one leg lazily crossed over the other, she looked over her handiwork. In front of her a polished stone table rose up from the floor, with actual plates of food sitting upon it. A piece of Mana Crystal shaped roughly like a wine-glass—filled with water, as she had figured out no other beverage yet—floated a few inches away from her left hand.

  Her [Primal Instinct] skill had led her to a herd of [Wildpine Deer], and several thickly-sliced steaks from one now graced her table. The boosted form of [Plasma Glaive] empowered by her new rune had worked far better than she’d planned, the beam of destruction killing three outright and wounding several others. “I guess the panther eats good tonight,” she said to Lulu as the scrubby wurbled its way around, cleaning up the plates.

  Also on her table was a giant nut, a volleyball-sized cross between an acorn and a hazelnut. The shell had required her to crush it between two stones with [Terrakinesis], but roasting the inner part over a fire had led to a pleasant taste similar to almonds. Definitely hope to find more of those in the future.

  Some things were similar to plants she knew from Earth, only bigger. A plate of greens with yellow dandelion flowers as big as her hand also resided on the table in a broad, shallow bowl. Some of the familiar berries that grew all over the forest added their own red and blue colors, as did chopped pieces of something Morgan had never seen before. It looked a little like a pumpkin, but it was purple with green striations through the meat of the fruit. It was every bit as tasty as her instincts promised, and the copious juices added a nice tangy flavor to her impromptu salad. Finally, her instincts had also led her to something akin to a green onion or a parsnip, though she couldn’t decide which it resembled more. The bulb was bigger than her fist, and the savory flavor had gone perfectly with the flame-cooked venison.

  Stone cutlery and utensils of varying quality lay upon the table as well, evidence of her attempts at making flatware. Actually trying to eat with it had provided varying results, and several punctures around h
er mouth were still healing, although the bleeding had quickly stopped. She couldn’t use her hands for working the forks and knives, but she could levitate them with [Terrakinesis]. I’ll just have to practice, she thought to herself.

  “And I’ll definitely have to figure out something like tea or coffee to drink,” she continued out loud.

  She sat and watched the sun set over the distant mountains, pondering her life since arriving on her new world. “I have two of those enhancement points Moghren told me about, Lulu.” The scrubby continued purbling its way around the table, seemingly content with the day. “But I think I need to save them, like she said.” She stopped to sip from her levitated glass. “For something more interesting than a fireball or my glaive spell, I mean. If they can boost a mastered spell as much as the old witch seemed to be saying, I think I should keep them for more fancy magics than just throwing fire and ice.”

  As the last of the day’s light died over the snow-capped peaks on the far horizon, she stood and stretched with a weary sigh. She took a moment to check the layered circles of enchantments she’d placed around her camp; two dozen [Pyreflame Runes], primed and ready to fire if the thin strands of Mana linking them together was broken. More [Mana Link] threads stood out to her senses, reaching back into the little stone house, and as she walked down the sculpted steps to the ground floor, she could see them faintly twist around the Mana Crystal in the center of the room. What had once been the jaw of a giant shellipede was now a violet-pink crystal spar. It was hexagonal in cross-section, as wide across as her forearm, and stood three feet from base to hooked, needle-sharp tip. Mana flowed out from it, along the threads of the Link, into her wards. She levitated her makeshift wineglass over to it, and a brief push with [Gem Sculpt] saw the glass merging back into the crystal, adding another half inch to its height.

  She topped off the crystal’s stores of Mana and made her way to the bed to lay down, followed by a wurbling loofah. Lulu seemed sleepy as well, and circled a spot on the moss-covered stone slab before trilling once and going still, but for gentle purrs. Opposite the bed, a fireplace with several chunks of smoldering wood had nearly burned out, and she nudged the pieces together with short bursts of air and let the remaining embers do the work instead of adding Fire. Temperatures bothered her less and less as her resistances increased, and she had no worries about getting too cold.

  “I need to stop wandering around,” she told the dozing scrubby. “I think I should start looking for a place to call my own.”

  Her [Primal Instinct] skill surged with satisfaction in the back of her mind at that statement, and she nodded in agreement as she made herself comfortable on the bed.

  “Time to claim my own territory,” she murmured, just before sleep claimed her.

  Chapter 26: Territorial Disputes

  Morgan Mackenzie crouched atop the corpse of a [Rockmaw], carefully applying touches of superheated flame with her fingertips. The last tendrils of flesh and gristle had finally been seared away, allowing her to pry up the large chunk of Mana Crystal that had once protected the neck and upper back of the beast. With its connection to the remnants of the dead beast’s Mana removed, her own Mana was able to take over the massive, glass-like plate. Standing back up, she levitated her prize up and away from the defeated [Rockmaw]. Surveying her path downward, she leapt from its back to a part of its hindquarters that wasn’t overly viscera-slickened, then down to the snow-covered ground. She turned and looked back over her erstwhile foe.

  Jaws wide enough she could step through their death-gaped arch. A burned and blistered tongue, studded with stones and slick with blood muddied by charred ashes, protruded from the mouth, larger than one of her legs, and several times as long. She shuddered; the [Rockmaw] had managed to snare her leg with that long, slimy tongue, and it had earned itself a meal before Morgan’s [Runic Chain]-enhanced [Plasma Glaive] sent its own tongue of destruction down its gullet. Superheated tissue and fluids left in its wake had over-pressurized the creature, causing its flesh to rupture in an impressive display of red steam and broiled meat, a good portion of which found its exit back through the thing’s mouth. Morgan had once again found herself covered in ick, a distressingly frequent happening that, even now, she hated every bit as much as the first time.

  Morgan let the fire within her come to the surface for a few moments, the blood and gore blackening to flakes of ash that blew away in the glacial mountain winds that constantly scoured the landscape. During her early travels in the Wildlands, she’d kept to the lower valleys and forested lowlands. The constant, sweltering heat of high summer had finally driven her to higher elevations; not because of the temperature, but because Wildlands summers were punishingly humid. I like a sauna as much as the next girl, she thought, but not enough to live in one all the time.

  So Morgan had headed west for higher ground. The mountains had proven to be further away than she’d originally estimated, but she persevered. And what she’d found once she climbed and climbed to crest the first mountain ridge after finally reaching it was…

  More mountains.

  The creatures had grown progressively stronger and more powerful the deeper she travelled into the highlands. Rams that reminded her of bighorn sheep the size of a small car, with plated skulls and two pairs of vicious, twisted horns. Enormous bears with ridged skulls and shovel-like claws. Her sole fight so far with one of the latter had ended in a stalemate: the beast dug its way away from her flames, while she hopped off to regenerate a below-the-knee amputation. She’d also crossed the territories of two more packs of [Direwolves], but without a guardian like the Packmother, she’d simply whittled them down through attrition until they left her alone.

  Her [Frost Resistance] had built up quickly, the nights at higher elevation dipping close to freezing long before she actually came near the snow line. She still enjoyed a hot bath with her loofah companion every handful of days, taking the opportunity to build campsites that were more lavish than her usual accommodations. Such breaks inevitably ended in battle more and more often as she gained levels, though. Her working theory was, as she grew in power, she became more attractive in some way to the various denizens of the primordial landscape. She’d gained a level every third or fourth day, it seemed, although after she’d reached level thirty, it had begun to slow down.

  Every level brought more stats, more Intellect, more skills. The key to improving her [Soul Anchor] had turned out to be improving skills with enchantments. She layered more and more wards and defenses around her campsites every night, and practiced new ones whenever she rested. [Runic Core] joined the other markings burned into her skin, interlocking chevrons and triangles bracketing her navel and forming a diamond pattern out of what looked like Celtic knots, but with sharp angles instead of rounded braids. The rune stretched from her sternum down to between her legs, and that particular experience had left her whimpering for several hours after it had etched itself onto her body. It stored Mana and Stamina similar to the Mana Well rings Moghren had shown her months before. With the rune currently at its fifth level, it effectively tripled her staying power in combat in all but the most extreme cases.

  [Runic Reinforcement] had come next, and despite its invasiveness, had been significantly less painful. It made her flesh and bones stronger, enhancing her ability to take hits. The incoming attacks that made it past her [Spell Parry] and [Runic Armor] did far less damage to her body, and combined with her [Athleticism], she could sprint for hours without worry of the accompanying soreness. The tattoo that had come with the rune ran from the base of her tailbone where it joined with her [Runic Belt], all the way up her spine to blend with the scaled armor etched over her shoulders.

  [Spell Resonance] was her latest Living Rune, and it gave her an extra sense for the magics around her. The tattoo presented itself as a gossamer-thin tracing of tiny swirls, only visible when the light reflected as she moved. On the palms of her hands and soles of her feet, it traced the patterns of her fingertips and toes like sh
iny henna art, and the practical effect was that she could feel magic at greater range and sensitivity: through the air, in water when she swam, and through the earth beneath her feet. If her Intellect hadn’t been expanded many times over since her arrival at the Tree, it would have overwhelmed her mind.

  It was thanks to this that Morgan wasn’t caught entirely flat-footed when her next battle found her. A gargantuan creature looking like nothing so much as an armored earthworm—fittingly, a [Burrowspine Earthwyrm]—erupted from the ground in a geyser of gravel and dirt where she’d been standing scant moments before. She’d sensed the Earth magic it used to travel beneath the ground, and tapped her [Acceleration] to clear the area just before a maw full of teeth and spines snapped shut around where she’d been.

  She turned and loosed a [Plasma Glaive] at it, the superheated Mana splashing off its chitinous armor and causing the air above to waver from its intensity. [Spell Resonance] further allowed her to feel the Mana layered throughout its plating, providing more defense than she could quickly burn through.

  Lulu, for her part, was undeterred; its boldness and bravery had only grown as it levelled alongside its mistress. Now a respectable level thirty-seven on its own, it had grown to the size of a volleyball, and its abilities had only grown more fearsome to match. No natural armor Morgan had yet faced could stand up to its [Exfoliate] skill, and Lulu seemed eager to show off again.

  The scrubby launched itself at the new attacker, and Morgan kept the wyrm’s attention on her with showy blasts from her [Plasma Glaive]. Lulu quickly found—or made—a gap in its armor, and the monster went from lunging at the Sorceress to contorting and snapping at itself in the span of a moment.

  Earth and stone heaved, rising up like a living thing as the beast thrashed, and Morgan was obliged to tap her own [Terrakinesis] to counteract it. A few moments later, Lulu obviously hit something vital—the worm heaved itself almost entirely out of its burrow in a single spasmodic movement, then shuddered, vomiting an unidentifiable rush of green and brown fluid, narrowly missing Morgan as she scrambled to safety. Already been covered in ick once today! Not again!